Mon Jun 07 1999 18:45:
As previously reported, I missed the first 40 minutes of the DS9
series finale. However, I saw enough to make this judgement: it
really, really looked like two episodes pasted together; a battle
episode which was really good, and then a wrap-up episode which wasn't as exciting. It stopped being exciting when Garak left, IMO, early in the second half.

I did like it, quite a bit. I haven't been following DS9 until recently, but
both the Cardassians and the Federation were made much more
well-rounded cultures in DS9 than they ever were in TNG.

The downloading is long done, but the upgrading of my system
continues. I switched from stable Debian to unstable Debian, so not only am I having to upgrade every single package, I'm
having to run the Install thing multiple times to get rid of all the
order dependencies which haven't been worked out yet. I crave the 2.2 kernel the way I crave tacos.

Speaking of programs with 2 in their names, I wrote a program on Saturday
called bbs2ansi which converts Wildcat! BBS display files (of which
I have a million, some of them very funny) into standard ANSI
(actually highly nonstandard ANSI, just because I can't be bothered
to do efficient ANSI) display files, for piping into iCE's 31337
convansi program for putting on the Web. It works great, although
it appears to have problems with blinking sometimes.